As a marketing professional I like to consider myself a pretty creative thinker, I mean I can come up with an effective campaign and absolutely execute on it but I’m not sure if I would have been able to come up with this idea let alone believe that anyone in public office would consider it. Yet there it was in photographic form, the man we all know as the KFC Colonel had his face spray painted ever so nicely on a newly repaired (covered) pothole.

You see, Kentucky Fried Chicken has for some reason decided that they can tie repairing potholes across the USA back to greasy and fattening chicken. In a statement on their website it seems awkward at best, “For more than half a century, KFC has “filled up” its fans with the Colonel’s world famous, freshly prepared fried chicken. Today, in a marketing first, KFC is celebrating its continued dedication to freshness by launching a pilot infrastructure renewal program, becoming the first-ever corporate sponsor of “fresh”ly “filled up” potholes in up to five major cities across the U.S.”

KFC Missed An Opportunity

Now normally I am not one for gimmick marketing, but I will grant you that this has the potential to be a really fun campaign and one that if done right could be modeled after the brilliant Burger King Whopper campaign, it’s just that KFC has not done anything more than the gimmick leaving me scratching my head.

I mean if you were going to undertake a stunt like this then surely you would want to have a microsite dedicated to it, get YouTube involved and have hilarious videos of the work in progress, hand out free chicken at toll booths across America, and certainly I would ensure that the Twitterverse was buzzing at all times. Yet when I do a search on Google and Twitter or boot over to YouTube, I am left with only the company’s press release and the blog posts of people like me who have picked up on the campaign. It seems backwards to me to have gotten involved in a stunt like this but in no way used it to bring people in and connect with them.

People obviously like the idea of the Colonel and nobody is eating KFC for the nutritional value, so why not capitalize on the fun factor of this stunt and take a page directly from the Burger King hand-book. They have managed to turn that creepy oversized King into a hilarious character and they’ve been able to centre it all around the Whopper.

The Colonel Could Learn From The King

Take a look at how brilliantly the Whopper campaign was done by BK, there were multiple microsites – Whopper Virgins – Whopper Freakout – both of which have produced videos viewed on YouTube over 100,000 times and have spawned viral parodies,  and if you are not following @theBKlounge, then you are missing out.


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